Lang Tao Sha (1936)
Directed by
Wu Yonggang
Also Known As:
Waves Washing the Sand
Runtime: 69 min
Country: China
Language: Mandarin
Subs: English
Color: Black and White
Sound Mix: Mono
imdb: NONE
The first sound film produced by the Lianhua Film Studio and another masterpiece by the director of The Goddess. The story revolves around a policeman and the criminal he pursues, both of whom end up stranded together on a deserted island. Leo Ou-fan Lee invokes Robert Bresson and suggests that the humanism of the plot becomes an almost existentialist statement, while film scholar Chen Huiyang traces the virtuoso montage of the opening sequence to traditional Chinese aesthetics and philosophy.
This is Wu's most underrated film, yet after nearly 60 years' hiding, it has been considered the best wu's film by film critics, even better than his The Goddess! In this film, Mr. Wu's brave experiment in sound and explores in film language made a totally bleak world to us. It's a excellent black allegory, not like any contemporary chinese realism movies, it's a real "sound film", the hallucinatory ambient sound and music play a very important role in this film, it's a unique, minimalism, symbolistic avant-garde work from a great film pioneer. Sadly, those peoples att can't understand it at all, so it hasn't received good critique and totally failed in box office. It's also pity that till now there're still a lot of chinese peoples never heard or seen this film, for my opinion, this unknown treasure deserves more attention and recognitions, it's another top work of chinese early cinema.
A GOOD REVIEW FROM ITALY, the only I can find on net. (click here)
Over the years spent watching and researching Chinese cinema, I have seen many films I loved but only few films really surprised me as much as Lang tao sha (Waves Washing the Sand). Wu Yonggang, who is also the director of the much more famous and very much acclaimed (inside and outside China) silent film Shennü (Goddess, 1934) produced this film in 1936. Contrary to Goddess, Waves Washing the Sand has not received much critical attention. Its very beginning can be considered a sort of manifesto — a statement on the visual/exhibitionist nature of the film.
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From my brief description it appears that Waves Washing the Sand has many powerful images, but I have found that it is its use of sound (as something that includes and goes beyond dialogues/monologues/or voice over) that enhances its visual strength. The film images heavily rely on the sound narrative to expand and explain their meaning. Sounds create connections and are often at the basis of the editing process. For instance, the passage from the murder scene to the sailor's escape is created by the tick-tock of the clock (visually present in the murder scene), which continues to tick in the mind of the sailor. This ticking takes us back to the murder scene where the police officer has arrived, is combined with the obsessive repetition of his own thoughts (wo yao huiqu, I want to go back), and finally is substituted by the sound of the policeman's steps. Later in the film, it is the persistent sound of the waves that expands the frame, connects scenes, and adds meaning by expressing a suffocating sense of imminent tragedy. In sum, sound—as a non-verbal external element that helps images to convey their meanings—enhances the film's visual quality.
In Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi (History of the development of Chinese cinema), Cheng Jihua has a very negative critique of Waves Washing the Sand and explains that he believes Wu produced Goddess with the Communist Party's help, but made Waves Washing the Sand when he had abandoned leftist filmmaking. After quoting Wu Yonggang's own words describing his film as a metaphor of humanity's failure to achieve solidarity and friendship in a society that creates hostility and suspicion, Cheng concludes,
According to the content of the film and to what the director himself affirms about it, it is not difficult to understand that what the film promotes is an absurd and reactionary thought where human society's class struggle and national fight are wrongly transformed in "killing one another" in order to "survive." The film therefore completely denies the social roots and basic principles of the class struggle and the national fight for liberation.
Why did Cheng Jihua dismiss the film as reactionary? Why did he attack Wu Yonggang whose Goddess he praises in another section of the book? I believe that the fact that Waves Washing the Sand is (or was perceived as) a reactionary film from the standpoint of communist ideology is not the only reason for Cheng's negative commentary. Cheng's critique might reflect his suspicion toward a highly visual film, which could not be read but only seen. If one is to accept the idea—and I do—that the Communist Party was a "party of the word" (as Apter and Saich define it) and since Cheng was a "man of the party," it makes sense that he considered the visuality of Waves Washing the Sand as (ideologically) unacceptable.
In fact, the film has almost been forgotten; I would say that even in the P.R.C. very few people have ever seen Waves Washing the Sand.
Lang Tao Sha - Waves Washing the Sand (1936, Wu Yonggang) VERY RARE TVRIP by auess.mpg 
Lang Tao Sha - Waves Washing the Sand (1936) ENG SUB.srt 
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(it's a pity, these people who're doing that great web site on Asian cinema as part of their academic research at Venice's university seem to be almost totally silent to the city as far as cultural initiatives or public screenings go... 
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... Me di cuenta de tu post después de hacerlos. 